From Canada to Africa, farmers helping farmers

 

 

Top: Students eat beans and corn grown in a school lunch program financed by Canadian Rotarians.

Bottom: Simple bowls of corn and beans enable children near Meru, Kenya to concentrate better in school.

Rotarians who grew up on Canada’s bucolic Prince Edward Island can relate to the universal challenges that farmers the world over face. That’s one reason four Rotary clubs there are supporting Farmers Helping Farmers, a charity that’s working to improve agricul­tural productivity in Kenya, which struggles with drought, poverty, and a poor educational infrastructure.

The clubs have raised money for a variety of projects in cooperation with Farmers Helping Farmers, from tanks that keep milk from spoiling to a school gardening program. Since 1990, for instance, the Rotary Club of Charlottetown Royalty has contributed about C$3,500 per year to the organization. Some of that has helped purchase five stainless steel coolers, which store milk from about 6,500 dairy farms in southern Kenya, says Winston Johnston, a member of the Charlottetown Royalty club and vice president of Farmers Helping Farmers.

In 2005, his club began supporting a lunch program at a primary school in Marega, where students and some parents grow corn, beans, cabbage, carrots, and tomatoes. As part of the project, the Charlottetown Royalty club pro­vided the money to build a cookhouse and supply three energy-efficient wood stoves, seeds, fertilizer, and rainwater tanks. For some of the children, Johnston says, the small amount of food they grow at school serves as their only meal of the day.

Stories of Farmers Helping Farmers’ success in Kenya prompted the Rotary Club of Stratford to contribute $2,500 in 2006 to buy eight ecofriendly generators for women in the southern part of the country, many of whom have lung problems stemming from cooking on wood fires. The generators, which feature a one-pot burner, run on methane derived from natural sources.

“The switch to methane gas is much healthier and cheaper because they don’t have to buy wood or charcoal,” Johnston says.

Over the past decade, another Prince Edward Island club, the Rotary Club of Hillsborough-Charlottetown, has given up to $3,000 a year to fund forestry training programs for women in Meru and supported a school lunch program in Marega.

The Rotary Club of Mont­ague has also chipped in, donating $500 in 2006 to buy gardening supplies for lunch programs at three schools.

The Canadian International Development Agency has matched all the clubs’ donations three to one. Learn more.